Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

As Zorka was slipping the bottle of Sprite into her jacket, he called out “Hey,” but didn’t move from behind the register.

Zorka grabbed the bag of chips and began to walk around the small aisle towards the door.

“You can take whatever you want, I don’t give a fuck,” he said.

Zorka stopped.

“My name’s Paul,” he said. “You from out of town?”

Zorka gave him the middle finger.

“O yeah I heard of that place. It’s hot over there… full of flames…” Paul laughed and took out a pack of Marlborough Reds from behind the counter and chucked them at Zorka. “On the house,” he said.

Zorka caught the pack and put it in her jacket pocket and began to leave.

“Wait, hold up. You ain’t even gonna tell me your name?”

Zorka stopped and thought about it.

“Zorka,” she said.

“You got a place to stay Zorka?”

Zorka shrugged.

“You wanna place to stay?”

“Not looking for rape,” Zorka replied.

The man laughed.

“Yeah me neither. Shit’s gross,” he said. “Wait, hold on – hold up. Look. Just hear me out. Like take me, right: thirty-six years old, working the cash register at 7-Eleven, most people’d think, that dude’s a fuckin loser, right? Bet when people look at you, they don’t see the truth neither do they? You ain’t a loser and I ain’t a loser.”

One could have called it a chance meeting. Paul was just filling in this shift for his younger cousin Ben, who worked the 7-Eleven after school. Financially speaking, Paul was not a loser. He lived in a pale-yellow house with a teal and purple painted porch in Jamaica Plain, off the orange line on Barowell Street in south-east Boston, which his uncle had left to him and his cousin Ben, after he got diagnosed with prostate cancer and tried to move down to Florida to take it easy for a couple months, but seizured in the airport and died near the baggage claim. Ben’s mum was living in Dorchester with another family, and Paul’s family had moved to Florida after his uncle’s sudden death, thinking, life’s too short. They called Paul from the baggage claim area, whispering into the phone.

“Why you whispering, Ma?” Paul said.

“I love you, Pauly, you be a good boy.”

“What the fuck, Ma, why you saying that, what’s going on?”

“Don’t swear, Pauly.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m putting your father on the phone.”

“Ok.”

“Pauly?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s your father.”

“I know. What’s up with Ma?”

“Pauly we’re ok, we’re just—” His father stopped speaking and a muffling sound twisted in the phone.

“Pa…? You crying?”

His father sniffed.

“Can I be honest with you, Pauly? You a grown man now so I can be honest with you.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re scared… We don’t wanna… go…”

“Go? Go where?”

“You know, Pauly. We don’t wanna… die…”

“DIE?! You think cause Uncle Hal drop dead all the sudden that it run in the family or something, I’m sorry but it was Uncle Hal’s time, that’s all. It ain’t your time and you know it. So just relax, ok?”

His father sniffed again into the phone.

“Maybe you’re right…”

“Take Ma to the beach.”

“I will.”

“Get some vanilla ice-cream in a cone.”

“I will.”

“I love you, Pa.”

“We love you too, Pauly!” his father said into the phone, then he heard his mother yell out in the background “I love you Pauly! Tell Pauly I love him and to be a good boy and to take care of Bennie!”

Ben was twenty, a computer science student at the community college in Roxbury, and working at 7-Eleven part time. Paul had a series of his own start-up businesses that he ran from home, one always failing and another succeeding, each idea growing from the decay of the previous. He used to freelance on Rentacoder.com, then built himself up as the Goldfinger, so-called because he could solve a client’s coding problem in no time, and always billed reasonably, and moved on to bigger clients that reached out to the Goldfinger with an emergency project here or there.

Since the house that Ben’s father, Paul’s uncle, had left them was big, with spare bedrooms, they decided to rent out the rooms to make extra cash.

In the two-storey house lived Paul and his cousin Ben, Rico from Texas, Kimberley from Vermont who hated when people called her Kimmie so Paul called her Kimmie, a French girl with rusty-brown hair and freckles who everyone called ‘the French Girl’ cause she had only recently moved in, and now Zorka, who Paul announced should be called Zoro cause she always wore black. Zorka said that anyone who called her Zoro would get kicked in the nuts and/or pussy, she said it with such a straight face that no one called her Zoro, except for Ben, who wasn’t there when she made the announcement, and promptly got kneed hard between his legs and doubled over, confused.

Zorka shared a room on the second floor with the French Girl, who was working at the European Wax Center on the crossroads of Beacon and Harvard. When Paul told Zorka she needed to get a job, she told him she didn’t have a high school certificate. Paul said, “Not a prob!” and the next day she had a high school certificate. “You can pay me back when you get a job.” Zorka took the thick piece of paper and inspected it. Then she let out a laugh. It was the first laugh he had seen from Zorka.

“I finish with honours!” Zorka exclaimed.

“Yeah, I figured… why not, you know. I’m sure you would’ve finished with honours anyways…” Paul said and gave her a wink.

Rico was different from the rest of the guys. He was short and chubby, with smooth tanned skin, and no facial hair except for a couple of wisps on his upper lip. He was from the Philippines but moved to Texas when he was three, and now he was studying comparative literature at Emerson College off Boylston Street in front of the Common, and he was there mostly on scholarship. Rico was a shy guy. Three times a week, he worked as a cashier at Whole Foods in Brighton.

Zorka and Rico would sit together on the teal and purple porch of the house, Zorka smoking, Rico twisting blades of grass between his thumb and forefinger.

“I know career,” Zorka said. “It’s like doctor lawyer cash-machine.”

Rico laughed.

“No… careers don’t have to be like ‘doctor lawyer cash-machine’, it’s like, how you want to interact with the world.”

“I wanna… fight maybe.”

“Fight for what?”

“So people don give me shit.” Zorka looked at Rico. “You dunno shit about shit!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, Zorka, I’m a short, chubby, brown trans kid. You wanna know what getting shit feels like.”

While Zorka was thinking about her career, Paul got her some shifts at the 7-Eleven and Rico got her books to read during her shift. Mostly poetry books, which looked easy to Zorka because they were short lines and only a page or two. For the first time in her life, sitting behind the cash register and watching the petrol pumps hung with their noses in the machines, Zorka felt a sort of calm. She didn’t want to pick a fight. She didn’t feel angry. She just wanted to sit and read and think and look at the sky negotiate its blues and whites.

She decided she wanted an aesthetician’s licence like the French Girl, so the French Girl gave her her books to study and led her through some of the waxing tutorials at home, when she’d sneak back some supplies from work, heat up the wax, and show Zorka how it was done. The French Girl gave her lessons on waxing – upper lip, chin, armpits, bikini line, butt-cheeks, butt-crack, anus… Zorka took to waxing right away. It was methodical and intrusive and she liked that. Her favourite were Brazilians, which she imagined onto those prissy private university girls with a personal sense of accomplishment.